From...

March 10, 1999
Web posted at: 6:17 p.m. EST (2317 GMT)

by Elizabeth Wasserman

(IDG) -- No Internet Economy topic is more burdened by jargon and bureaucracy than domain names. Making the process of assigning names more competitive has proved painstakingly slow, but it's also opening up vast stretches of real estate and crowning new land barons online.

Last week, the group at the heart of this process - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known affectionately as ICANN - met in Singapore and made some progress.

Two rival groups with equally mysterious names - the Paris Group and BMW (the acronym stands for Barcelona-Monterrey-Washington) - presented ICANN's interim board with proposals for the Domain Name Supporting Organization. DNSO will tackle some explosive domain-related issues: trademark policy and the addition of new top-level generic domains. The ICANN board opted for a third, middle-of-the-road plan.

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ICANN also approved guidelines for new companies seeking to become domain-name registrars to compete with Network Solutions, the company that held an exclusive government contract for .com, .org and .net registrations. ICANN set a March 15 date to begin accepting applications for a test group of five registrars, which are expected to start operations at the end of April.

Some would-be domain registrars applauded ICANN's progress and sang the praises of Esther Dyson, the group's chairwoman.

"They're pushing and getting it done," says Rich Forman, founder of Register.com, a would-be registrar. "Esther made a Solomon-type decision. Moving forward is more important at this point than getting every little thing right."

The struggle in Singapore came over DNSO, and the recognition of "constituencies" that will be granted voting rights and membership. The Paris group (made up of country-code registries and Network Solutions) wanted open membership that could organize into various constituencies. The BMW group proposed six constituency groups: commercial and business interests, ISPs and connectivity providers, noncommercial domain-name holders, registrars, registries and trademark, intellectual property and anticounterfeiting interests.

The draft adopted by ICANN takes BMW's list and splits the registries category into two groups: top-level, country-code domains and top-level, generic domains.

"The membership was broadened so that no specific group could 'have capture' over the whole DNSO organization," says Network Solutions spokesman Chris Clough.